2016-03-22

Public Bill Committee Written Evidence #IPBill

I am sorry that it has taken so long to get together a proper report on my findings when considering this Bill. It has been a lot of hard work, and I am very grateful to the assistance of many colleagues on this, including working through much of the Bill with me page by page on a Sunday!

If you are thinking of making a submission, please do so ASAP. The first oral hearing is Thursday 24th and they have asked for evidence by Wednesday to allow time to consider it.

Please do feel free to quote me or copy to your MP. Ultimately they are the ones that vote on this.

I am happy to meet with MPs and Lords on this matter.

Oh, damn, once again, under this Bill your computer would now be logged as accessing a porn site, just because you read my blog. It would not log that you only accessed a benign favicon image, as that would be content, just that you accessed something on the site. Oops.

The best of luck but I doubt that many of the relevant MPs will even bother to properly read your submission, let alone be capable of understanding it. They know full well that this imposes 24 hour surveillance on every citizen because that has been their objective from the beginning, although bare faced lying comes naturally to all MPs.

The real fight will come after the bill is law when I'll be relying on the people in A&A and elsewhere to devise clever loopholes to at least thwart the data retention aspect and its secrecy clause as much as possible.

Just a note about the cross-site image. I know why you're doing this but I made the mistake of viewing your blog from work (they allow some limited personal browsing). It looks like I may have some explaining to do ... oh well.

I think you've done this before and no one questioned me then so hopefully I'll be ok.

PS As suggested, I have written to my MP with a follow-up to our previous correspondence on the IPB. I suggest that she look at your evidence, and have offered to meet with her to further explain my severe misgivings with the bill as currently presented.

Everything I write here is just my honest opinion and not a statement by my employer, etc, you get the idea. If you find any words or pictures menacing or offensive, or likely to impair your computer, or alarming or distressing, stop reading now and don't come back (and don't forget to block me on social media too). Nothing here is legal advice. Everything on this blog is without prejudice, just in case. Comments are moderated so do not appear instantly. You take responsibility for any comments you post. Always bookmark www.me.uk as I may change the URL blogger sees.

And please, if you don't like what I post, say so - comment - discuss...